Google to add social media to Gmail to rival Facebook

Google is reported to be set to add social media bells and whistles to Gmail in an effort to take on Facebook and Twitter.

Google will add status updates to Gmail as well as photo galleries and other sharing options, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

All Google has at the moment is its Orkut social networking site that is big in India and Brazil according to Wikipedia. Being big in India and Brazil is clearly useful as they are big, but considering we never hear about Orkut it can't be that useful.

I wonder if what it is doing is enough. Sure it is a start, but it has a lot ground to catch up. I also wonder how much space people have in their lives. Do people want to share in multiple places? Well look at Yahoo! It made similar such moves allowing users to of Yahoo Mail to make status updates and clearly on its own that is not enough. As no on I can think of suddenly started raving about Yahoo!.

Sure Google owns technology like YouTube and Picasa but working against it is that too many people use Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or other rivals. Email has become like your bank account and the idea of moving is something most of us don't contemplate.

I personally think Gmail is the best thing in email. I prefer it to Microsoft Outlook for work. That could be because of the clunking servers we have and the miniscule amounts of space allocated that is designed to make life difficult (yes IT overlords I am talking to you).

That said I use Facebook most days at work (for work; honest) and on the move on my phone. It is more immersive.

I'm not sure I have the time to do more social networking stuff. I mean if you throw in Twitter and blogging then I am just about done. I need the rest of the time to have a life.

The Wall Street Journal says that Google could announce the new Gmail features as soon as this week.

"Currently, Gmail has a chat bar that can display a short 'away message' for each user's contacts," WSJ reported. "But the new interface will have an area that users can click through to see updates from more friends in a stream -- a format popularized by Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., [Google sources] said."

The move follows new design updates from Facebook last week to make life easier for its 400 million plus members. Apparently Gmail has around 176 million unique visitors. Many of those will doubtless have Facebook accounts as well.

We also heard last week that Facebook was chasing Google as a place where people read news. It is now fourth placed behind Google, MSN and Yahoo!.

Facebook has already over taken Google News and Google Reader. The changes it made to its design recently touch on email as Facebook chases Google on that front as well.

The spill over is putting the two head to head in an increasing number of areas and Google clearly feels the need to respond.

How far will its efforts socialise Gmail get it? I'm guessing not as far as it wants and not as far as it needs to go.

Another interesting question is what does this mean for brands? They are already very much part of Facebook's social fabric. Likewise for Twitter. All we have at the moment in terms of commercial activity on Gmail are those ads that scan your system and apparently serve you targeted ads.

This morning I have this "Baltimore Wharf Apartment". Seriously, Google you need to do some work on this. Besides I've seen 'The Wire' and it's unlikely I will ever go to Baltimore. 

It could throw up new opportunities for brands to interact in new ways. Who knows how this could work or the opportunities it might present. No one foresaw Twitter being such a boon to brands although as I blogged yesterday some remain scepitical about Twitter's benefits and that could be a challenge for Google in the socialising of Gmail if it too plans to entice brands deeper into its world.

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You're a left wing iPhone using pinko

No seriously it's true that's just what you are according to some new research that found the left favoured iPhones while the right favours the Blackberry (that hissing you heard just then was me dropping my 8500 into my tea).

The research was done in the US around the hotly contested race for the governorship of California. What it found was that iPhone users prefer probable Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and Blackberry users prefer the Republican Meg Whitman (the former CEO of Ebay).

iPhone users support Democratic candidate Jerry Brown over Republican candidate Meg Whitman 57% to 31% while Blackberry users support Whitman over Brown 47% to 38%.

I am betting that if the research was done in the UK we would see a similar left/right technology split. The research throws a fascinating light on the politics of technology. Apple with its cool design and sleek look has always had a particular liberal creative appeal as part of its brand giving it an almost rebel brand status that eschewed the dull corporatism of rivals.

It's interesting to see that as Apple products have become almost ubiquitous, and much more widely owned than when it was simply a computer firm, its original market appeal does not seem to have been greatly diluted.

I'd always suspected that as ownership became more widespread via the iPod and iPhone so would the character that makes up its customers and while there has been some change that we can lay at the doorstop of ubiquity apparently not as much as I'd once thought.

Apple owners it appears (whether they closely identify with the brand or claim not to: like me) are still broadly residents of the liberal left.

The research from new technology coalitionCALinnovates.org a identified a couple of other useful nuggets worth checking out as the general election approaches in the UK.

It found that a "supermajority of voters" use Facebook and that the social networking site is not just for the kids. We already knew that, but with 62% of the under 50s on it that gives you a lot of people to work with.

Facebook has more than doubled in size since the 2008 presidential race and with its broad appeal its role in a California governorship race or a general election might not be huge but it is not to be ignored. It can do something for your political campaign wherever you might be running.

The research also found that nearly half of voters follow candidate's Facebook and Twitter profiles with 40% of social media users supporting or following candidates via Facebook or Twitter.

We read last week about Facebook's rise as a place to read news (it is now the fourth biggest and apparently ahead of Google News) the research had more evidence of this trend with 26% of voters saying they read political news and information via social media sites.

Social media is quickly becoming the political norm and as pollster Ben Tulchin puts it "candidates need to adjust with the times or be left behind".

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Marketers with no time for Twitter

Some top marketers in the US have come out and said they have no time for Twitter including Procter & Gamble, Hyundai and Converse.

In a report in Adweek asking how effective Twitter is as a marketing tool it cites several marketers saying they do not think it has anything (or very little to offer them). As well as the three above the piece names other examples of brands that have racked up big fails using Twitter like Delta Airlines (barely updating its account for six months).

What's interesting about some of those cited like Hyundai is that they don’t think it is for them when rivals (Ford for instance) have had so much success using Twitter.

Joel Ewanick, group vp of marketing for Hyundai told the US ad magazine that: "I'm not a big fan of Twitter. My Twitter meter has gone down."

He added that for him Facebook is much more useful. He said Twitter had become the butt of a joke. "You start seeing in popular culture people making fun of Twitter."

Geoff Cottrill, CMO for the Nike-owned Converse (neither brand has much presence on Twitter added to that saying Twitter was overrated.

"Twitter is a little bit overrated. There will be a new media toy that will replace it in a year or two."

Both put more faith in Facebook as does Procter & Gamble. Last month VentureBlog reported from an event sponsored by P&G the FMCG giant was sceptical about Twitter but had a love of Facebook.

"They described Twitter as much more like television than one might think. To P&G, Twitter is a great broadcast medium -- it is best for one to many communications that are short bursts of timely information -- but as good as it is for timely information, the P&G folks do not view it as particularly relevant to what they are doing on the brand building and advertising side.

"For those things that Proctor & Gamble thinks are most interesting and important, they do not believe that Twitter will ever approach the value they can get out of a Google or Facebook. But they are open to looking at other alternatives that will have more of the engagement and brand building attributes that they hope to exploit in Facebook."

That could all be true. With all three, but I also wonder if part of it is that they just haven’t found the right way in to get any momentum on Twitter in the way they have on Facebook.

What's interesting for example about Hyundai and these other examples is that you know (or at least can guess) that unlike Ford, which has been successful, that they have not invested the budget or the time in developing their Twitter activities in the same way.

Ford has made headlines not only with its head of social media Scott Monty, but with the fact that it is investing 25% of its marketing budget into social media. That means not only cash, but time, resource, hard work and some interesting ideas. On the back of that Ford has won a well publicised return.

Twitter as part of a larger social media campaign can work for everyone, but you still need to apply some thought and creativity to how it is being used. Why I'm convinced of that is partly because of the number of examples of markets where there is a dominant player losing out smaller players (Hallmark and Somecards; JetBlue and Delta are two examples). The question is why are they losing out (with Delta we already know that answer -- and its failure brings with it a lot of clues to the success of others).

Even the most basic of activity on Twitter such as news and customer updates doesn't have to be done in the most basic of fashions. Interesting things can be done with just about anything. I think that's what people using it very successfully have come to understand.

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Tory bloggers come up short on #Kerryout campaign

If you wanted an example of how negative digital campaigning can fail then look no further than the #Kerryout campaign that is seeking to oust Labour's new media spokeswoman Kerry McCarthy MP.

Some Tory bloggers have already distanced themselves from it and one has warned it is childish and will backfire. After all the publicity and many blog posts mostly orchestrated by Tory Bear the campaign has managed to raise a grand total of £1,7000. So little. So much effort.

As personal attacks go it has created only negative buzz around the Conservative candidate Adeela Shafi. You have to feel sorry for her saddled with such witless enthusiasts as those behind the Kerryout campaign. Bristol247.com described it as "embarrassing".

All it has done is spurred others to engage in tit for tat campaigning and help raise money and sympathy for Labour (okay I am biased but I don't think that is in dispute). It is all lamentable.

It has led to the story in the Daily Mirror claiming that "Tory star Adeela Shafi has £325,000 CCJ 'debt". I don't have anything to say about that and I don't know if it is true or not. It is besides the point. What is almost certainly true is that story is a direct result of the efforts of that many of Tory bloggers (Iain Dale among them) who have backed this campaign. Nice job boys (they are all boys).

What is true is that Adeela Shafi is like the poster girl for the next generation of David Cameron's new generation of Tory MPs, but she is not helped at all by any of this. She has failed to distance herself from this campaign and to disown it. You have to wonder why that is and what that says about Conservative Party, its message and its politics.

What's most disappointing is that the emergence of digital communications in political campaigning has largely been positive. That's one of the things that came out of Blue State Digital and its work on Barrack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign.

It showed the great power that digital has for positive change. It showed its strength in helping to organise and to unite people around common ideas. It showed how you can put the message in the hands of supporters as it brought people with common ideas together both digitally and in the real world. It created a huge groundswell via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube and Flickr.

I like Labour's campaign -- Change we see -- I think that is a good example of harnessing positive digital campaigning.

Elsewhere and so written about we have seen it in Iran. We saw that again in Iran and in other protests movements where people have organised for change using social media sites. The downside appearing to be being state security services also use it to crack down on protest. The discussion around that is another post in itself and the debate between Evgeny Morozov ("Why the internet is failing Iran’s activists") and Clay Shirky ("The Twitter Revolution: more than just a slogan") is worth checking out on Prospect.
 
Those are the benefits, but low and dirty childish campaigns like the #Kerryout campaign have none of those positive qualities. That's why after months you've ended up with such a paltry response. That's a fail then.


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The London Weekly arrives - and it is shocking

I'm fairly shocked the London Weekly made it to the streets. It is out and we have copies floating around the office. The verdict is worse than you could imagine. Low quality and badly designed and no match for a good local newspaper let alone the Evening Standard.

I'm non-plussed why anyone would do this? It is full of mistakes from the front page onwards. Why would you publish and print something as poor as this? The front page story about the "Prime minister kicks off the week with a game of rugby" is embarrassing. A lame press release and not really the calling card you would expect from a new paper speaking for Londoners.

It is an immediate turn off for advertisers but amazingly there are some advertisers inside: Sea France, Southern Comfort and some from theatre land. Did they pay?

One question is answered by the cover date which says Feb 5-6th. There is clearly no plan, as originally stated, to print on Friday and Saturday. They clearly plan to distribute this same rag again tomorrow targeting...shoppers? Will it make it to a second issue? Does anyone care? I doubt it.

Anyway take a look.

Facebook close to 400m users as growth accelerates

It was only two months ago that Facebook announced it had hit 350 million users and now it is about to hit 400 million. Couple that with yesterday's report that it is now the fourth biggest traffic source for news sites then its significance to all of us appears to be growing by the day.

Back in June Facebook reached 250 million active users and by December Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social networking site he founded had grown to 350m users globally (23 million) in the UK and that his target was 1bn.

That is a big number and it is announced on the site's sixth birthday. In the space of 60 days give or take Facebook has attracted 50 million people – that's 830,000 people a day --- and its growth appears to be accelerating.

Here's what Zuckerberg has to say: "Today we're celebrating our sixth birthday, and this week there will be 400 million people on Facebook. Just one year ago we served less than half as many people, and thanks to you we've made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected."

News of the 400 million club comes as Facebook also announces changes to its design and navigation. There are improvements to search and the way pictures are uploaded and they've added a new games application dashboard to make it easier to find these things should you want them.

The focus there is clear. These games are massive money spinners (like Farmville) and traffic drivers, which is in part helping to fuel Facebook's growth.

"We're making it easier for you to find and interact with applications and discover new ones, with the new Applications and Games dashboards, accessible via the "Applications" and "Games" links on the home page. The dashboards will surface the applications you've interacted with most recently as well as your most recent application activity and your friends' activity."

There are already 3,000 comments on the post announcing changes to Facebook's design. Plus another 2,500 plus saying they like it. That's an engaged community. The post only went up five hours ago.

Facebook Connect also looks to have played a big part in this and that has barely got going. People have called Facebook Connect a game changer and we are going to see big things with that this year.

As more sites implement Facebook Connect it will doubtless persuade more users to Facebook because it so easily allows people to hop around the web with a single login.

What's interesting about Facebook Connect and its success with sites like the Huffington Post for instance is that these are sites come with a huge cross section of audience in terms of age and demographics, which underscores Facebook's success (and MySpace's failure). Facebook has broad sustained appeal from your mother to your kids.

What's also interesting is that the growth appears sustainable. It took it six months to get it the 100 million users it needed to growth from 250 million to 350 million, but only two months to add another 50 million. That raises the prospect of Facebook of hitting 500 million users by June.

What will that mean for news sites and the likes of Google News? It could be significant as more and more people choose Facebook as the platform not only where they network with friends, share pictures, play games, but also stay informed.


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Pay wall problems -- Murdoch unlikely to launch on time

If you needed indications that something is not quite right with the whole pay wall revolution there was plenty today: Rupert Murdoch is still "looking at alternatives" for a spring launch and Steve Brill's Journalism Online partners are small and local. Yikes.

The Times Online is meant to launch its much written about pay wall in the Spring, it recently appointed Gurtej Sandhu to oversee the venture, yet in a conference call to reporters talking about News Corporation's results Murdoch had this to say.

"We're looking at various alternatives - and I don’t think we’re ready to announce yet. We're in the midst of a lot of talks with a lot of people that are coming to a head - and you'll hear a lot more from us in the next two months. We'll be charging for online wherever we have publications."

That Spring launch? How is that going to happen if you are still have talks and looking at options. I don't see it.

I'm sure they will make it happen, but clearly they are struggling to find something that works for them.

Murdoch added to that comment about charging happening wherever News Corp has newspapers by saying that it wouldn’t surprise him if Australia was a couple of months behind the other countries.

I wonder if that means anything more than there is more resistance to pay walls in Australia or if it's simply it takes so long to get there? Will Aussies pay? It seems only fair. They already get free sunshine.

Elsewhere on the Damascan paid content road trip The New York Times has news of Steve Brill's Journalism Online venture.

We reported last year how it had signed up first 500 and then a 1,000 partners for its venture that would create a system (now called Press+) allowing newspapers and magazines to charge for content while it took 20%. The partners were all unnamed but the way they threw around such big numbers you had the impression that they were going to have some big hitters on board.

Five months on and we get the names of some of its partners. They include The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era (which is like the longest name for a newspaper: ever; has to be). The paper is based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has a circulation of 44,000.

Others on board are The Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina. It has a circulation of 61,875 and then the third partner is revealed to be a news site in Boston called the GlobalPost.

The New York Times piece goes on to say that Journalism Online claims now to have 1,300 news sites around the world signed up – but will not name them. That strikes me as really odd particularly when they have been at it for a good while now.

Somehow a small newspaper in Pennsylvania does not strike me as the place where you are going to find the vanguard of the paid content revolution.

Steve Brill and Co appear to be struggling to find big hitting partners. Murdoch is doing his own thing as is the New York Times (in 2011 – a paid content odyssey) and there are plenty of others who like The Guardian want nothing do with it just yet.

I'm still convinced that some kind of paid content can work, but at the moment it all looks to be on the ropes. Maybe not quite as much as this research and its pile of corpses in year of "media destruction" would have us believe though.

If you wanted another clue here it is. Guess where The Intelligencer Journal-Lancaster New Era is trialling its foray into paid content and its Journalism Online effort.

It's news right? No. It's sports coverage maybe? No. It’s business news? No. It is starting with its obituaries. I kid you not. Love the message.

Ernest J. Schreiber, editor of the Lancaster paper’s site, LancasterOnline.com told the NY Times: "We’re starting small, so if this really turns people off, we're not playing with a huge chunk of our readership.

"We have news that no one else has, like these obituaries We would eventually take other sections of our online content into the system. I’m thinking local sports, perhaps."

Perhaps indeed.

Previous posts

ABCe's spell bad news for Times and good new for Guardian.co.uk 

Guardian CEO says charging for specialist content an option

Pay wall experiments to produce a pile of corpses in year of "media destruction"

Pay wall day – Johnston Press begins charging for content 

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The free newspaper bloodbath – more to come

Some interesting figures kicking around on the free newspaper market, which lost five million copies in 2009 and has turned into something of a "bloodbath" with more to come.

The stats from Newspaperinnovation.com make for interesting reading. It says the free paper business saw massive growth in circulation group between 2003 and 2008 as dailies tripled from 14 to 42 million. Obviously a big part of that growth came in the UK where we saw the birth and death of Thelondonpaper and LondonLite.

Then in 2009 that all changed. Circulation of free dailies dropped rapidly falling from 42 million in 2008 to 37 million at the end of 2009. That is a -12% decline and the largest part of that came in Europe where 60% of free dailies are distributed.

"Looking in detail at the European market, the situation resembles a genuine bloodbath at first sight. Only three free dailies are left In the UK (Metro, City AM and The Evening Standard), but in the past a dozen titles closed down.

"In Sweden only one of the three national titles remains; in Denmark two of the five national free dailies closed down plus all free local papers; in Spain the number of free dailies went from 34 in 2006 to 14 in 2010; in Switzerland there were eight free dailies in 2008, now only three of those are still in business. In Germany a dozen free newspapers were launched in the last decade, none survived."

It goes on. There is a graph.

So what does this herald for much talked of possible phantom new free launch in the UK known as the London Weekly. It is supposed to go live this week, but appears to have no staff, no promotion and media agencies know nothing about it. We were told last month that it was on track for launch and would distribute 250,000 copies on each day (it is being distributed on Friday and Saturday).

Paul Morris, head of advertising at the paper, told Brand Republic that the lack of promotion was down to the quick turn around time for launching the paper and this had prevented it from speaking to "enough agencies".

MediaGuardian quoted one media agency exec who said that he had talked to the paper's ad team who told him the were targeting advertisers in the retail, theatre and film sectors.

"I think it is the most amateurish, doomed-to-failure thing I have heard of in years. They have not really been in touch with [media] agencies. The business plan targeting Friday and Saturday is two different groups, one commuters, one not, so it is not clear how that is going to work"

There is no word on the complicated distribution network it will need. This paper will not make it to the street.

Question is what on earth is going on with the whole thing in the first place? What possessed anyone to start this? Why have a quick turn around? Oh boy, you could go on all day asking questions of this, but really it is simply suicidal to try it after the closure of the Thelondonpaper and London Lite. It all looks like some kind of media madness. That or a whole load of BS. It could just be that.

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Social media confusion and the problem with ROI

Why do some people get it and other don't? Starbucks boss Howard Schultz is quoted in Marketing today saying social media is the channel that takes priority and in the same issue we hear that four fifths of markers do not see it as core. Whose right?

Schultz is asked in the interview which one channel will take precedence, here's his answer:

"I think social media is a natural extension of our brand because we want to do things that are unexpected, and to speak to all sorts of people who are engaged with social media. It's tough to measure but there is an incremental benefit to sales."

It is a great quote as in it he encapsulates not only the essence of what social media can achieve (the unexpected and the variety of conversations you can have), but also what for some is the problem or the stumbling block to using it: ie it is tough to measure. Where they ask is the ROI.

It is this lack of ROI that has led to only a fifth of marketers in organisations like Coca-Cola, RBS and the COI viewing social media as a core element of their marketing strategy (so says an Internet Advertising Bureau study).

Marketing reported that only 22% surveyed said that "social media forms a major part of their promotional strategies" and that many marketers are "confused about the role" social media should play in their marketing plans.

In contrast to that 22% are the 75% who cited proving ROI as social media's biggest challenge and the 64% who said measurement was the biggest hurdle to investment.

I was having this conversation yesterday with someone from a New York based social media consultancy (Mike Moran form Converseon) and we were talking about PR.

It is a difficult discipline to monitor or to assign ROI to, but it is widely seen as essential. Corporations employ numerous PR agencies, their own in-house PR's and not forgetting internal corporate comms people.

No one questions the value of PR or thinks too much about assigning ROI to it. It is clearly done well worth its weight in gold.

That is one thing t(the PR thing) that struck me, but looking back to the comments Howard Schultz made he must think about ROI when he thinks about the 200% rise in profits at Starbucks in the last quarter.

He must think about ROI when he discusses how the coffee chain attracted 5.1 million Facebook fans and 768, 527 followers and how according to Nielsen the time spent by users on social networking sites has more than doubled since December 2007.

Nielsen said last month that consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in December 2009, an 82% increase from the same time last year when users were spending just over three hours on social networking sites.

If you want to talk to these people you'd better be where they are.

I'll mention Dell again. You kind of have to and while the $6.5m it made via Twitter is a drop in the ocean it is part of a growing drop that many savvy firms are part of.

Look at the other end of the spectrum from a £1000 PC to a £10,000 car. Ford is spending 25% of its marketing spend on social media and James Farley, CMO, said put it nicely last year: "You can't just say it. You have to get the people to say it to each other."

Of course he could say that. Ford went big with its Fiesta Movement to launch the little car that people have had here for years. It started its campaign in 2008 a whole 18 months before the cars shipped stateside. The results as this Businessweek piece says were eye opening with 37% of Generation Y aware of a car that was not even available as the result of blogs, tweets, Facebook and YouTube.

What more do you want?

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Guardian CEO says charging for specialist content an option

Guardian boss Carolyn McCall has echoed other execs at the paper in ruling out a move to paid content, but said that it could charge for "specialist content".

In an interview with the Financial Times, the Guardian Media Group chief executive said that while her position was not set in stone she saw no commercial evidence that pay walls generate returns.

"It is the wrong thing to do right now because the jury is out about whether that is the way consumers are going to get information. We will watch what happens," she said.

It's an interesting choice of words the "watch what happens" pointing to the internal debate the paper has had about pay walls. Clearly this has been a hot topic in The Guardian boardroom and while I know they have all come out against it you get the impression that some were more against charging more than others.

For the Guardian with its rising traffic (new record of 38 million unique users for December reported on Friday) it looks like the way to go. Less so if you are the Times Online and traffic is falling (ABCe's spell bad news for Times and good new for Guardian.co.uk).

McCall added that the Guardian, like the New York Times, had looked at six different pay models including a complete a complete "pay wall". She said that introducing pay barriers would restrict the Guardian's journalism.

Last week editor Alan Rushbridger in the Hugh Cudlipp lecture expressed his preference for the Guardian to remain without a pay wall and to build on its £25m strong advertising revenues.

Interestingly, it took the New York Times a good while to reach any conclusion before it told the waiting world that it was going ahead with a metered plan in 2011. And all the reports suggest that debate was fierce on the issue within those Manhattan media corridors with dissenting views not in short supply.

While McCall ruled out a pay wall she hinted that there were areas of content Guardian.co.uk could charge for:

"That is not to say there are not areas of specialist content that cannot be charged for," she said.

This could point to any number of things. The Guardian membership club that has been written about could be one such area of specialist content that people pay for. Guess we'll see.

Also in the piece McCall talked about jobs. With its "higher levels of permanent staffing than other UK national newspapers" Guardian News & Media has cut 150 jobs across editorial and commercial with 100 jobs going this year.

She said Guardian News & Media had got its cost base down to where it wants and said it was not planning more cuts but would not rule them out.

"You can never say never in the current economic environment,” she said.

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Social Media ROI: Socialnomics

There are some great inspirational slides in this social media ROI presentation that are worth writing down as they make a lot sense and apply to so much of what everyone is trying to do with their social media strategy no matter what business they are in.

I've pulled a few out that I think resonate most strongly. There is a video with more in at the bottom. You might have to turn the music down.

Social Media ROI: Socialnomics the video

Social media round-up: Kellogg Social networking ads, Obama, Pepsi and boomers

Kellogg in social media push for Krave

Campaign reports Kellogg has appointed CMW to handle a digital and social media campaign to promote the launch of its new cereal brand Krave. Krave is the first cereal launched by Kellogg in the UK that specifically targets the young adult market.

It is looking to engage the brand's core audience of young adults through a high-profile social media campaign, the first time Kellogg has embarked on a social media campaign to support a brand in the UK.

Consumers Are Not Annoyed by Ads on Facebook

An Ad Age report saying users find ads on social networks no more annoying than any other ads on the web.

According to a study from research firm Dynamic Logic, consumers view brand messages on social-media sites as comparable to those in online video, and are only slightly more annoying to internet users than search or banner ads.

"While that's better news for Facebook, which has been embraced by blue-chip marketers such as Procter & Gamble, it's a bit of a backhanded compliment. Indeed, all web ads pale when stacked up to TV and print, which can claim twice the favorability among consumers, according to Dynamic Logic's Ad Reactions 2009 study."

 Social Media Marketing: How Pepsi Got It Right

Mashable on Pepsi's Mountain Dew division and its DEWmocracy campaign — a plan to launch a new Mountain Dew flavor with the public’s involvement at all levels of the process, and PepsiCo also just launched the Pepsi Refresh Project on January 13th. Rather than spending money on Super Bowl television ads this year, the company is spending $20 million on a social media campaign.

It quotes Jay Baer, founder of the social media strategy company Convince & Convert, saying that brands are realizing they need to market for the long haul. “I do think it’s a good move for Pepsi. I don’t know if every brand can pull it off,” he said.

Social media on Obama's speech mirrored Americans' frustration

CNN on how the tone of tweets on Twitter and posts on Facebook in reaction to President Obama's State of the Union speech Wednesday night are in contrast to the optimistic comments on his speeches to Congress in September and during his inauguration.

It says social media users showed more frustration compared with the more hopeful tones in the past, with many saying they hoped the president's rhetoric would lead to more action.

"Their frustrations with the lingering economic doldrums, high jobless rates and the battle over health care are reflected in Obama's approval ratings. They have dropped from 76 percent to 49 percent since February. Social media comments echoed those sentiments."

Baby boomer use of social media growing

SeattlePI on how the boomers are finally getting social media: "Early last year, I signed up for Facebook. Since I'm a blogger, I wanted to see what it was about. It was a surprising experience. I learn more about what my friends and relatives are doing through Facebook than I ever learned through e-mail, letters, or phone calls."

Baby boomers' social network use has grown steadily from 2007 to 2009. A recent studying shows that 30 percent of boomers maintained a profile on a social network in 2007 compared to 46 percent in 2009.

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ABCe's spell bad news for Times and good new for Guardian.co.uk

Here's something to think about. You are Rupert Murdoch and you are erecting a pay wall around The Times in London in the Spring and your unique users take a 5% dive in December to put you 16 million behind the Guardian.

Ouch, I mean really. What else can you say? I don’t know. I have no idea about any of this but I am looking at the figures.

These figures are for December. We might have bought less newspapers but some of us were surfing a great deal more.

The Guardian is up by 3.32% to 36,980,637 million. The Mail Online is also up by even more to 5.1% to 32,843,958.

The Independent was up as well. Wore the Indy, which rose 4.71% to 9,347,658 million, is closing on the Mirror.co.uk. The Mirror dropped 8.73% to 9.7 million uniques. Isn't that just a little embarrassing? To be more than 10 million behind the Sun Online?  The Sun Online rose 3.5% to 20,907,012.

Back to the Guardian and Times Online. There is so much daylight between the two that you could hold a daylight saving convention (do they have those?). It can not be encouraging if you are about to put up a pay wall. I say that as a fan of the paper. I like The Times. I'm a huge fan of David Aranovitch.

The same question must apply to Times Online as it does to the Mirror. What is our closest rival doing so right that it grows and continues to do so and we go in the opposite direction at a faster pace? It is not an isolated fall. Times Online's unique users fell in November as well down 1.65% year on year to 20.9 million.

So much so that it allows Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger to come out earlier this week and say that Guardian News & Media (which made £25m from online ad revenues in 2009) is putting is faith not in pay walls, but online advertising and free content. It could do that from a position of great strength.

Clearly, there is something to be done at the Times and it knows this. Earlier this week it promoted Daniel Finkelstein to executive editor online. As well as being involved in pay wall plans he will clearly be looking at what it is already doing. Looking at what works and what does not work so well.

He has overseen the paper's Comment Central operation. Good work too, I would say if Times Online wants to repeat some of the success The Guardian has had in that area it has a way to go yet.

Maybe Finkelstein who is the paper's former chief leader writer, a one time SDPer and Tory advisor, has some tricks up his sleeve. A drop to less than 20 million uniques says he'll need them.

All this in the same week that speculation The Times could be offloaded by Rupert Murdoch floated through the Twittersphere. Apparently this all came from an unreliable UK banker (is there any other kind?) and News Corporations insiders say there is absolutely not truth to this rumour whatsoever.

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The verdict on Apple's iPad - view from the blogs

It is only hours later but already many blogs are saying the iPad is not all that it is cracked up to be. It is apparently a large iPod Touch or maybe it is more than that depending who you read. Whatever it is or not it seems a little too early to be pouring so much cold water on the launch.

People are saying some really nice things and voicing some disappointment. That was bound to happen. The hype was out of this world.

The tablet was going to save the publishing industry in terms of books, magazines and newspapers and now they don't seem to think so, but they don't know this for sure as it is all too early and no one has really seen the content. It is as if we had the speculation and then the launch and now the second wave of speculation like some endless carousel.

It is the content that will make or break the iPad. Okay, price as well, but we kind of already knew that. Apple does not do cheap, but it has also sold 250 million iPods; it is a $50 billion company and the biggest mobile app firm in the world. Nice numbers. What is certainly true is that the iPad is beautifully designed and great to use and you don't get that cheaply. What you get cheap is a make-do bargain netbook PC and they do a certain job.

What they don't do is even half of what an iPad can do even at this stage, but it is definitely a pricey luxury product and not the universal piece of tech that will quickly create a solid revenue stream for content providers.

People are saying it might take a year. Well that makes sense. If this is after all a device that will have a revolutionary impact (rather than being revolutionary par se) then it will take time for that content to be created and come forth and for that revolutionary change to take place with predictions of three to four million selling in the first year (let's not forget the famous Slashdot comments writing of the iPod).

As for content. It seems almost like people have not had the time and maybe this was all rushed. People were under whelmed by the New York Times app. Clearly they wanted to be part of this, but the iPad seems more about what the paper will do with its paid content system and that isn't arriving until 2011 and by then one imagines the app will have been better developed and finessed.

HERE'S WHAT THE BLOGS HAVE TO SAY -- THE GOOD

It's fast and beautiful
BusinessWeek The half-hour or so I spent playing with the iPad at its San Francisco unveiling yesterday was much too short a time to evaluate it authoritatively. What I can say is that it’s fast, beautiful and loaded with potential. I was struck by its speed and responsiveness. In the photo application, for instance, I could race through hundreds of photos in a blur.

Boy is it light
Wired.com The iPad’s really light and thin, weighing only 1.5 pounds and measuring half an inch thick. It was like holding a chubbier iPhone with a prettier face. You can tilt the iPad any direction, even upside down, and the screen will flip to display an upright image.

Great for browsing
Wired.com If you thought the iPhone’s browser was nice, you’ll love the tablet’s version of Safari. It’s been blown up and some of the buttons have been rearranged to better suit a larger screen.

It is just cheap enough
BusinessWeek “At that price, they’ll sell millions,” said Hakim Kriout, a portfolio manager at New York-based Grigsby & Associates, which owns Apple shares. “It’s very, very affordable for what it does. This is going to add a huge revenue stream for Apple.”

Ideal for that novel
Valleywag The silver lining for print media was in books. Jobs showed off an "iBook Store," an iBook app for e-books, deals with five huge book publishers (Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillian and Hachette) and a format based on the open ePub spec. Jobs even said that textbooks would be a big part of it.

Could repalce the netbook or e-book reader 
Engadget Will it replace my laptop? Never. But it could certainly serve as an able replacement for a netbook or an e-book reader -- especially since I think the choice between a $489 Kindle DX and a $499 iPad swings firmly in favor of Apple. Like mostly everyone else on staff, I think the right approach to the iPad is to wait and see; I think the difference for me is that I'm assuming we'll eventually see something good.

AND THE NOT SO GOOD

Disappointing keyboard
PCWorld Like the rest of the OS, the touch keyboard is a larger version of the iPhone's. But unlike on the iPhone, the keyboard has no letter magnification when you press a key, and I found I missed this visual cue immensely. And unsurprisingly, it lacks haptic feedback (part of Android phones). You get no physical or visual feedback when you press a key and that's frustrating if you're trying to pound out a long e-mail. The experience, oddly, is akin to typing on the native Android OS' touch keyboard.

Not a new third category
Forrester The question has arisen lately. Is there room for a third category in the middle?" I was sitting on the edge of my seat, ready to hear Jobs demonstrate that new category of device. But he didn't. Instead, what Apple debuted today was a very nice upgrade to the iPod Touch. Don't get me wrong. I love the iPod Touch and I was this close to getting one for myself. Now that the iPad has arrived, I can finally get one, the new, big one. But it's not a new category of device. It doesn't really revolutionize the 5-6 hours of media we consume the way it could have. It doesn't even send Amazon's Kindle running to the hills. In fact, the competitor likely to take the biggest hit from the arrival of the iPad is Apple, in the form of fewer iPod Touches sold and fewer MacBook Airs sold.

No drag and drop
Mashable You won’t be able to drag and drop or share files with other computers like you can with your laptop on your home network. You won’t be able to download a program or music file from the web and play it on the spot. You won’t be able to use any application that doesn’t meet Apple’s strict approval guidelines. It’s closed computing at its most extreme.

Print media let down. No immediate wow content
Valleywag There was not one demo of an i-magazine, just a quick visit to Time.com, complete with a Flash media error (reportedly). No wired version of Wired, no singing verion of Rolling Stone, not even a video-enabled Sports Illustrated. That's astonishing for such a sexy, high-resolution device that's repeatedly been billed as a boon to magazine publishers.

Things were nearly as disappointing on the newspaper front. The Times did get five minutes to show off its own tablet app, but, as many others have noticed, it looked like a boring, warmed over version of the existing Times Reader. In fairness, the Times guys only had two or three weeks to work on the app.

A jack of some trades
Engadget What is was, however, was fairly underwhelming. Maybe underwhelming isn't the right word. Unimaginative might be more accurate.

There's no question that much of what the iPhone and iPod touch do translates nicely here, and there's no question that some of the tweaks made to native iPad apps are impressive, but nothing I saw made me sit up and think, "Wow, I need this."

Big and heavy ideal for three handed person
The New Republic The iPad is by no means a sure bet. It still, after all, is a tablet—fairly big and fairly heavy. Unlike an iPod or an iPhone, you can’t stick an iPad in your pocket or pocketbook. It also looks to be a cumbersome device. The iPad would be ideal for a three-handed person—two hands to hold it and another to manipulate its touchscreen—but most humans, alas, have only a pair of hands. And with a price that starts at $500 and rises to more than $800, the iPad is considerably more expensive than the Kindles and netbooks it will compete with.

The other  - The lingering questions
AllThingsD So, the iPad is more than just a giant iPod Touch or iPhone, even though it looks like one. But the question is, will that be enough to get consumers to shell out for it, and make it part of their daily lives? Or will it be a niche product, like Microsoft’s (MSFT) Tablet PC or Mr. Jobs’ own Apple TV?

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Apple names tablet computer the iPad

Apple's long awaited and endlessly speculated about tablet computer is called the iPad and CEO Steve Jobs has called it "a magical truly revolutionary product".

The launch taking place live now in San Francisco comes ahead of a March 1st shipping date. The iPad has just under a 10 inch screen and is ultra thin like many of the rumours had speculated. There is nothing on the Apple site yet so difficult to work much out from this pic.

Jobs said: "Good morning and thank you all for coming today. We want to kick off 2010 with a magical truly revolutionary product today."

Jobs said that everybody now used a laptop and or a smartphone and that the question was is there room for a third category of device in the middle that was better than both devices.Yes he's talking about an e-reader or a new kind of e-reader in the form of the iPad, which is kind of reminiscent of those pads they used in Star Trek.

"We’ve got something better, and we’d like to show it to you today. It’s called the iPad.

Jobs said that what this device does was extraordinary allowing users to browse the web with it and manipulate the page with your fingers better he said than a laptop, "way better than a smartphone", and a "dream to type on".

The iPad had built in calendar, an address book for your contacts, a maps application and the iTunes Store allowing users to watch TV shows and movies.

"It's so much more intimate than a laptop and so much more capable than a smartphone with this gorgeous, large display," Jobs said.

One of the first applications developed for the iPad is one from the New York Times. Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president, digital operations for The New York Times Company, is at the event talking about the application. Although this got the thumbs down from a Wired.com tweeter who said that the NY Times iPad app was "vastly disappointing. looks like the website with a fancy read later button". Also there at the launch are MLB and EA Games.

Key iPad features

Apple iPad 0.5 inches thin,
Weighs 1.5 pounds
Display is 9.7 inch (almost 10 inches)
Multi-touch screen
Can run all iPhone apps
Uses Apple'1GHz A4 chip
Wi-Fi